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How not to troubleshoot

What’s the first thing you check if you have a lamp that’s not working. Is it plugged in? That’s right. What’s the first question the guy from tech support asks when you report a problem. “Did you restart?” If you asked Occam why you can’t get a close shave, he’d tell you to check the blade. The solution to any problem is usually the simplest one.

I wish I had that in mind today when I ran into a WordPress problem. I was simply trying to put a widget into a sidebar using the menu that pops up when you click on the widget. Every time I clicked on the widget, it froze my page. All the widgets for that particular plugin had the same problem. None of the other widgets produced the same effect. After a few minutes of my usual “If I repeat the process enough times, it’ll fix itself,” method, I Googled it. The plugin developers suggested the usual drill, shut off all the plugins and run it on a default theme to check for conflicts. I didn’t want to change themes on the site I was working on, so I did it on a local sandbox environment. Everything worked fine, which led me to the conclusion that it was either the plugin itself or a theme conflict. At that point I’m about 30 minutes into the process. I’m getting cranky.

I started to mentally compose my message to support. Then I thought, let’s just try it with a different browser to see if that was problem. Oh, I forgot to mention that I’d just upgraded to Yosemite OX 10.10, so that was another monkey wrench in the works. I fired up a new browser and not only did the widget worked fine, the one that I had clicked on when it first froze was already in place. When I opened the second browser, I shut down the other one to save memory. So I fired up the original browser again and… WTF everything was back in working order.

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